Jean-François Godbout is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Université de Montréal. He studies political institutions in Canada from a comparative perspective and is mainly interested in legislative behaviour. He is currently carrying out research on analysing legislative speeches in the Parliament of Canada. He is one of the editors-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Political Science and is Director of l'Observatoire des fédérations, a research unit of the Centre détudes et de recherches internationales de lUniversité de Montréal (CÉRIUM).

Axis 3: Representing and Governing Citizens in Critical Times - After learning and practicing democratic citizenship, the next critical steps are representation and governance. Democratic institutions are key elements. They shape the norms and incentives for active citizenship and they link citizens and their representatives in ways that foster accountability, legitimacy and representation. In Québec and Canada, as well as in other countries, confidence of citizens toward the institutions is low, as many dislike the way that members of parliaments behave and consider that politicians dont honour their promises, hence various political endeavours to reform these institutions. Research on this axis will focus on the role of electoral systems, parliaments, parliamentary debates, and political parties.

Students

Florence Vallée-Dubois, Ph.D.(Start: 2017)My interests include political behaviour and Canadian politics. My research focus is on the impact of population ageing on democratic representation.

Despite the emphasis on parliamentary reforms in recent decades and the introduction of new legislative procedures, research on free votes remains highly restricted in Canada. Only a handful of studies have examined the influence of free votes on legislative behaviour. These studies range from brief and partial explorations or succinct mentions of free votes (Franks 1987; 1991; 1997; Atkinson and Thomas 1993; Docherty 1997, 141; Brooks 2007, 292; Kam 2009, 77-78; Thomas and Sabin 2013, 4-5) to segmental empirical studies of issues related to specific votes in Parliament (Pothier 1979; Overby, Tatalovich and Studlar 1998; Longley 1999; Overby, Raymond and Taydas 2011). In fact, no study has been interested in analyzing all of the free votes in the Canadian House of Commons recorded after the Confederation. In addition, scholars had analyzed data on legislative voting without developing a theory in order to explain the development of this procedure over time, or to understand why party leaders may strategically use free votes in the legislature to avoid intra-party conflicts.
Within the context of this Ph.D. thesis project, I intend to address the puzzles surrounding free votes in the Canadian House of Commons. Using a rational choice institutionalist approach, I seek to address these flaws by developing a theory of parliamentary free voting, which will explain why party leaders decide to allow an unwhipped vote, while on others occasion, they do not, and why Members of Parliament vote the way they do during free votes. Two case studies will be used as an explorative and confirmatory strategy for the testing of my theory of parliamentary free voting. The theory will also be tested empirically at the party or macro level, and at the individual or micro level model. The micro level will also allow me to test some of the democratic representation expectations of free votes. Furthermore, the testing at the macro level will permit me to answer about the effect of free votes on party unity.

Philippe Mongrain, PhD(Start: 2017)Election forecasting is now a thriving discipline in the United States, where a large number of different models are being used to forecast the outcome of congressional elections or the fate of presidential candidates. In fact, during the last forty years, most forecasting models have been created for the American case. For their part, Westminster-style democracies have received very little attention. Although we can find a certain number of forecasting models for the United Kingdom and Australia (for example, Jackman and Marks 1994; Nadeau, Lewis-Beck and Bélanger 2009), there exist only one model to predict the incumbent party's vote share in Canadian federal elections (Bélanger and Godbout 2010) and, to our knowledge, none has been created for New Zealand. Due to the dominance of the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States, the vast majority of American models predict the two-party vote share, a measure that is almost irrelevant for countries where more than two parties compete for votes. Hence, the goal of my thesis is to develop a series of theoretically-driven models that can be used to predict the popular vote share (and seat share) of the main parties in the most important Westminster countries.